I received a mail from a reader wondering about my lack of a picture round. Specifically, they wondered if I had deprived them of a Eurovision-themed round. Fear not! It was just a ‘regular’ picture round. If it had featured 20 Eurovision performers, I would definitely have gone the extra mile to post it up!

The Eurovision really is a gold mine for trivia. What a shame it won’t be around again for another 51 weeks…

This year’s Eurovision Song Contest may have come and gone but our host at this week’s quiz in Gilligan’s, Claremorris, had just come back from attending the event in Düsseldorf.

This led to the round I’ve been waiting my entire life to try: a Eurovision music round! More on that later.

I was paired up with Aidan, who I’ve been been with before, and his mate Andrew, who was making his Gilligan’s debut.

Our highest scoring round on this night was nothing to do with the song contest, mind you. Round 5 featured a hand-out listing 20 car models, with teams asked to identify the manufacturer of each. A 20/20 here took us from also-rans into joint second at half-time. In the end, our team won by the narrowest margin possible, our 120/150 pipping my mate Ger’s group to the line.

No-one likes being defeated in a playoff but losing by countback is even worse. For me, it makes those post mortem discussions about the ones you got wrong in the regular quiz all the worse. You’ve seen the 14 questions we got wrong. If we’d managed to get just a single one of them right, we’d have avoided the playoff and won by a point.

Once upon a time, I was on a team that lost out on €5,000 on countback. That was even more cruel as (a) the organisers didn’t even bother with any form of tie-breaker that night and (b) we tied with the other team on the same amount of 10s so it went down to who had the most 9s! I’ll tell you all about it someday.

The scores were very close at last night’s quiz in Gilligan’s, Claremorris. My team, The Pub Spies, led at half-time by two points but, alas, had a bit of a ‘mare after the break. To cut a long story short, we ended up tied in the lead on 95/110 with, funnily enough, the team whose answer sheets we’d been correcting all night, Eurovision. So, a playoff was announced.

Now, I’m pretty sure the evening’s quiz master had turned up without any playoff questions! However, he did a pretty good job of thinking some up during a five minute spell. Here’s how the playoff went:

In the world of cycling, what is a Mamil? (As it turned out, this should be written MAMIL)

Which team are the current Heineken Cup champions?

Which two European capital cities are closest to one another?

Claremorris native Lucinda Creighton is the Minister of State for what portfolio?

In journalistic short-hand, what does the term “manne” signify?

Stone the crows, but both teams ended up on 2/5. Due to the fact that it was getting late, and that there weren’t any more questions, it was then decided that our scores from the main part of the quiz would be examined to see who got the most 10s. Unfortunately, ‘they’ did, and we were defeated by 4-3.

I suppose it was fitting that a team named after the event that first introduced me to the term ‘countback’ should end up winning.

Our team ended up on 95/102. Why such an unusual total? Well, one of the rounds came to an abrupt halt after only seven questions. However, it did include the question about the Roman Emperors (see below) and we were told that we’d get a point for each one. There was also another question which had two parts and each of these was awarded a point also. Thus, the round with seven questions became a 12 pointer.

Afterwards, I asked the quiz master what happened.

“I had all the questions typed up on the computer and I printed them out just before I set off for the pub” he told me.

The vagaries of the random draw threw up an interesting situation for my team this Tuesday night at Gilligan’s, Claremorris. Three of us (myself, Tom and Turlough) had been together last week as well. As you probably remember, we ended up losing by (a largely self-inflicted) four points. So, this week, would the addition of one new player (Mick) make the difference?

The answer to that question was “yes” as, with a nice bit of symmetry, we ended up winning by four points. 🙂

It was interesting to notice the dynamic that developed even after just two weeks. We’d already started cracking in-jokes! However, that ends now as I’m sure next week’s shuffle will see us scattered to the four corners of the bar.

I hope no-one had a brain melt looking at such a large amount of questions! I don’t normally inflict such a long list on you. Mind you, I’m afraid the site’s readers weren’t what was top of my mind on the night. “How did we manage to get that one wrong?” was more the standard thought running through my head.

I did remember one of the two ‘missing’ questions earlier today. However, I don’t think there’s much point in adding it in now.

I’ll keep it under my hat and use it for the ‘Might come in handy someday…” box – someday.